"A1" HDV export to tape options/solutions

[Bruce Pelley]

Gents:

I’m looking for options to solve my problem of the A1 repeatedly failing to successfully transfer/export data direct to tape from Premiere Pro's master timeline. Even with all non essential processes disabled in my PC & the internet being disconnected, at random times the transfer stops and another attempt had to be made until I gave up.

I’ve had it suggested that I spend $1,000 or more to beef up my PC or have one built.

I do have access to a Canon HV-30 which in the past yielded a couple of successful attempts where the A1 had failed.

So, now for the dumb and ‘uninformed” question:

Will there any difference in quality if I use a HV-30 as compared to an A1 to do the job?

Is the recording circuitry in the HV-30 sub-standard to the A1 and therefore maybe the outcome to tape via the HV-30 wouldn’t be as good?

Hope not…… don’t know!

All thoughts and comments welcome.

Thanks

[Chris Soucy]

Originally Posted by Bruce Pelley

Will there any difference in quality if I use a HV-30 as compared to an A1 to do the job?

Is the recording circuitry in the HV-30 sub-standard to the A1 and therefore maybe the outcome to tape via the HV-30 wouldn’t be as good?

It's digital. If the camera can read it, it's an exact copy of what is on the tape. The technology may well be different, but, as it's digital, it doesn't make a jot of difference.

If any camera you can get your hands on can read it, it's as good as the camera that shot it.

Might be an idea to stick some serious wellie into that PC tho', if it can't even handle HDV. That's gotta be one sick puppy.

Or invest in a head cleaning tape, or a UPS system or..........the list goes on.


CS

[Bruce Pelley]

Chris,

What I find particularly exasperating is that I can very easily import HD material with HDV Split night and day consistently with no problems from the A1 to the PC with CS3.2.

However, on the other side of the coin, directly exporting to tape from Prem Pro's master timeline to the A1 gives me grey hairs and about a 95% epic fail rate.

Very imbalanced results.

[Panagiotis Raris]

what are your computers specs? also, if using CS4 its probably the software. seriously; i could NEVER import with CS4, nor export to tape; it always dropped frames, froze up and bogged down, no matter what. CS5 works much better, but now i dont use tape.

[Jay West]

Can you post the system specs and the project size.

I had intermittent problems with CS 3 and HDV Split in both capturing from and exporting to the XHA1. I mostly used my HV20 for those duties and mostly captured under HDV Split. I used HDV Split instead of CS3 because CS3 had other issues with HDV capture, particularly in maintaining audio synch.

To answer your questions about compatability, the XHA1 had no trouble reading HV20 tapes and vice versa. There is no difference in the quality of the info coming out or going in.

The only problems I had were with the camera communicating with the computer. I was using XP SP3 with 4 g of RAM. It might have been the computer or it might have been the relationship of CS3 and the XHA1 or some combination of them.

There is one thing to check that might be a problem. I ran into this when I first started working with HDV files under CS3 about 5 years ago. I sometimes ran into the kinds of problems you described (with any camera) when writing to tape when: (a) the project disk was more than 60% full; (b) it had not been recently defragged; (c) the project disk was an external USB or firewire drive; and (d) I was writing HDV to tape. If used the on-board Raid 0 as the source drive, and it was no more than 80% full, I had no trouble with HDV going to tape on the HV20.

When I built my new workstation with Win 7 and CS4, I also went to mostly tapeless recordings. So, I haven't done much with tape recently. When I have shot with tape, I haven't had any trouble capturing from the XHA1, although that is usually using HDV Split on a Vista 64 Laptop capturing to an eSata drive. I have only written HDV to tape on the XHA1 once, recently, and that was under CS4 from my Vista 64 laptop. I did not run into problems then, but I can't really comment on whether it was the different computer or the later versions of Premiere that fixed the problem. I've had no problems on the Win7 Workstation (now running CS5) except that, some days, it has trouble recognizing the XHA1 and it takes a couple of reboots before it will recognize it. (Incidentally, I did try all of the varieties of format settings in the XHA1 menu: SD locked, HDV locked and "Auto." It just takes two or three tries before the workstation computer and the camera are willing to speak. Maybe the software just wants to know if you are serious. No such problems with the laptop, though.)

[Bruce Pelley]

Gents,

Thanks a lot for be willing to become involved in this discussion:

For my intended usage,experience level and goal I'm not sure I need CS 4 which seems to be riddled with issues. It would be trial and error to see if CS 5 with a beefed up PC made this problem go away.

I use HDV Split exclusively for capture because it works great. For that reason I never really was motivated to mess with Pros' capture function. My video/source files are on a pretty new Samsung Spinpoint 1TB 7200 rpm drive. The OS & other types of files are on another 250 gig drive. The project drive is also the video drive. That drive is presently has 627 gigs left out of 931 gigs available due to formatting.

Computer is a couple of years old running Vista Home Premium SP2, 32-bit, 3 gigs ram with the CPU being a modest Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40 GHZ with a ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro card.

At this point I should ask if I should be installing service pack 3 and will that potentially make any difference at all. If installed, will it effect the functionality or the existing video drive negatively in any respect?

I forgot to mention I did a defrag within the last couple of weeks in an effort to solve this issue. Someone mentioned in a earlier post to another forum to do it.

The size of the project is about 47 minutes or so in length. The project disk is internal. PC recognizes the A1's conencted just fine.

Yes, I believe without a doubt that the camera loses communication somehow which stops the flow of data.

Jay, you lost me there when you stated: "If used the on-board Raid 0 as the source drive". What is meant by Raid 0?

Panagiotis, as an aside, my parents have lived in Mohnton, just outside of Reading for over 20 years so I'm familiar with your 'neck of the woods" so to speak.

Again, thanks to all those who have taken an interest.

[Bo Sundvall]

Hi

Failure to export HDV material to an XH-A1 with CS3/CS4 is a known problem. I don't know how CS5 handles export to Canon camcorders but I havn't read anything that says it will work better.

Exporting HDV to an XH-A1 under CS3/CS4 works if the material is somewhere under 4 minutes. If longer, the export fails somewhere around 4-6 minutes. The last version that could do HDV export to an XH-A1 without problem is CS2.

The problem is that Canon blaims Adobe for incompatible software and Adobe blaims Canon for incompatible hardware.

I don't know if the same problem appears on the HV-models. I own a HV20 myself but havn't had it for so long, so I have not tested HDV export to it.

See Adobe forum here on DVInfo for more information about this.


Regards,

/Bo

[Bruce Pelley]

Interesting Bo!

Never tried HDV export to tape with CS2 which I also have.

Maybe I should backpedal, reimport my completed CS3.2 project into CS2, re-render then adjust as necessary and see what happens. seems like I'd lose qaulity there somehow though.

I had a project yesterday that failed around the 35 minute mark and another last week that failed at about the 46 minute timeframe on a 53 minute project so one never knows what will happen!

Thanks for your input as I hadn't thought about researching this issue on the Adobe Forum here at dvinfo.net.

[Bo Sundvall]

Don't forget to update your CS2 version with editing presets for Canon HDV camcorders if you use frame mode. This patch is available on Adobes web here Adobe - Premiere Pro : For Windows : Editing presets for Canon Progressive-scan HDV cameras

I have a version of CS2 on a separate boot drive which I use to transfer back to tape when projects are finished. I first render out a m2t-file from CS5, import that file to CS2 and transfer it to tape. It probably lose some quality in the process but I don't know if it is possible to see any difference.

As hard drives get cheaper and cheaper I almost find it unnecessary to transfer to tape any more.

Regards,

/Bo

[Jay West]

Originally Posted by Bruce Pelley

Gents, * * *At this point I should ask if I should be installing service pack 3 and will that potentially make any difference at all. If installed, will it effect the functionality or the existing video drive negatively in any respect?

* * *

Jay, you lost me there when you stated: "If used the on-board Raid 0 as the source drive". What is meant by Raid 0?.

The problems I had with the XHA1, CS3 and XP persisted under SP3. I agree with Bo and would still recommend using your HV for capture and recording to tape from CS3. If it works, there is no reason that I can see that you need to record to the XHA1 for project masters.

A "Raid" is using two or more hard drives linked together function as a single combined drive with much faster throughput than you typically get from a single drive. The types of RAID go from level 0 -- which is basically two drives acting as one --- up to higher numbers with more drives that allow for both higher speed data movement and "redundancy". Redundancy means that a particular drive can fail/crash without any loss of data and sometimes mean that you can "hot swap" replace the failed drive.

For starters, you could check out this thread.
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/high-def...xplain-me.html

[Panagiotis Raris]

Originally Posted by Bruce Pelley

Gents,

Thanks a lot for be willing to become involved in this discussion:

For my intended usage,experience level and goal I'm not sure I need CS 4 which seems to be riddled with issues. It would be trial and error to see if CS 5 with a beefed up PC made this problem go away.

I use HDV Split exclusively for capture because it works great. For that reason I never really was motivated to mess with Pros' capture function. My video/source files are on a pretty new Samsung Spinpoint 1TB 7200 rpm drive. The OS & other types of files are on another 250 gig drive. The project drive is also the video drive. That drive is presently has 627 gigs left out of 931 gigs available due to formatting.

Computer is a couple of years old running Vista Home Premium SP2, 32-bit, 3 gigs ram with the CPU being a modest Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40 GHZ with a ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro card.

At this point I should ask if I should be installing service pack 3 and will that potentially make any difference at all. If installed, will it effect the functionality or the existing video drive negatively in any respect?

I forgot to mention I did a defrag within the last couple of weeks in an effort to solve this issue. Someone mentioned in a earlier post to another forum to do it.

The size of the project is about 47 minutes or so in length. The project disk is internal. PC recognizes the A1's conencted just fine.

Yes, I believe without a doubt that the camera loses communication somehow which stops the flow of data.

Jay, you lost me there when you stated: "If used the on-board Raid 0 as the source drive". What is meant by Raid 0?

Panagiotis, as an aside, my parents have lived in Mohnton, just outside of Reading for over 20 years so I'm familiar with your 'neck of the woods" so to speak.

Again, thanks to all those who have taken an interest.

your PC does seem a little sluggish, especially with source/project drive being the same. if the datarate is exceeded it will drop out the camera sync (ask me how i know. tried to import with a netbook once).

RAID0 is 2 or more disk drives that are seen by the computer as one drive, and it writes to each physical disk simultaneously, but not the same bits. imagine i have a 4 lane highway and 300 cars that need to pass through; they will pass through MUCH faster because they will be split over 4 lanes instead of just one.

i had better success with SP3, but i moved away from XP 2 years ago. There is one suggestion i have that solved ALL my tape capture issues; i bought an HDV to CF card capture device. with a fast HD capable CF card that records over an hour it was around $530 shipped, but well worth it; no more dropped frames or import problems, and no more tapes period. for all my old projects, i can play back the footage on the XH A1 and record on the DN-60 at the same time, no PC required, take those files and archive them on a hard disk. and we can shoot to tape with 2 cameras or more, and on the spot capture to CF cards and dump on a laptop, so we can either NOT use tape, use it as a backup, or save a ton of tape and downtime by cycling cameras and tape shooting/import.


is the 1TB drive connected via ATA, SATA, USB, or 1394/Firewire? how long can you capture before a dropout?


i have many friends in Mohnton and Reading, its actually where i met my fiancee. i am originally from Alaska and Greece (odd but mixed family and lots of travel) it is my 'base of operations' at the moment lol. LOTS of great work done up at the Pagoda!